At our January Trends & Prediction webinar, our panelists and moderator covered three terrific topics. And we heard you! Rather than leave you with just a recording and slides, we’ve also transcribed the key points covered by our panelists to help you absorb the full context of the discussion.

The most requested topic post-webinar was “Personalization Impact on Prospect & Customer Engagement Strategies”. In this session, we featured three power-houses in Marketing, Sales and Customer Engagement. This blog post covers a Customer Engagement view with Audrey Ross, Director of Customer Engagement, her 2017 trends and 2018 predictions for personalization and interactive content.

2017 Customer Engagement Trends in Personalization

At a macro-level, interactive content in 2017 was personalized, at least within the context of the content experience. For example, someone answers a question and sees the result quickly. Or they click on a chapter title in an eBook and are taken to that chapter. The content itself has that personalized experience.

In 2017, we’ve seen customers do some interesting things with personalizing their content, and many are embracing the idea of progressive profiling in their forms by integrating ion with their marketing automation platform.

For example, by integrating the two platforms, they are able to remove form fields altogether for data already in Marketo and ask more targeted questions that can build a more accurate and customized profile of that lead and their preferences.

Now we move onto predictions.

In 2018, I predict we’ll see an increased use of data within the marketing automation platform to remove redundancy and create more impactful drip and nurture programs. By using engagement and click activity from interactive content to track user behaviors and actions, marketers will continue to optimize and improve customer experiences

Prediction 1: Increase demand for data collection for engagement and click activity from interactive content. Result = tracked user behaviors and actions will be optimized to improve prospect and customer experience.

I’ve already seen this prediction in action. One of our customers identified key actions, like clicks and views, in a lead’s consumption of their interactive content and fed those actions into Marketo. What this allowed them to do was tailor future email nurture follow-ups and remove redundancy in the campaign.

To elaborate a little deeper on how they removed redundancy, here’s a little more context. If in the content experience a lead viewed and consumed was a particular video, that video promo email would be suppressed from that lead’s drip series within Marketo.

So by using interaction data within the interactive content, marketers can tailor that one-to-one experience. This results in the lead being served a better experience with your marketing, and the brand has actionable, valuable data on that lead to enhance the buyer journey.

A second prediction I have for 2018 speaks to marketers looking to create interactive content that uses logic in fresh new ways, which means content feels more dynamic and personalized to the user.

Prediction 2: Logic and scoring tactics will be required within interactive content to help the content feel more dynamic and personalized to the user.

There’s lots of ways to approach this, but here is an example. We had a customer create an eBook that had a “job title” segmentation question on the title page of the eBook. The interior chapters of content were dynamic and used logic to personalize that experience, based on the user’s job title. So a designer saw designer content while a developer saw developer content. Lastly, the “job title” data captured in that simple segmentation question was pushed to the marketing automation platform to build a lead profile for future content suggestions.

I think we’ll see a lot more of this in 2018 as marketers realize the value and potential in delivering a more personalized experience overall.

That wraps up our Customer Engagement view of “Personalization Impact on Prospect & Customer Engagement Strategies”. Stay tuned for design trends or catch up with Marketing and Sales.